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A sub-trope of Does This Remind You of Anything?, this is a scene where someone (usually a man, though cases of Mister Seahorse don't count) goes through all the motions of a Screaming Birth, complete with screams of "you did this to me" and someone on hand to give encouragement being common. But what's really going on is something much more mundane or ridiculous.

Occasionally the victim will simply be the Panicky Expectant Father himself, struggling to get through the agony of his wife crushing his hand to cope with her own pain.

Examples of Not Really a Birth Scene include:


Advertising[]

  • A car commercial featured featured a woman panting and her husband telling her to push, and it turned out she was trying to get their stalled car out of the mud.

Anime and Manga[]

Film[]

  • In Evolution, when the doctors have to get the alien insect that cut it's way into Harry's body by going in through the colon and pulling it out, and the scene plays out in this way.
  • In Blankman, Blankman and his cousin Kevin help a woman trapped in an elevator to give birth. All three are screaming loudly as this happens, though. The woman, for obvious reasons, Kevin, because when he offered his hand to the woman, she grabbed his crotch instead and squeezed as hard as she could, and Blankman because, well... he's a bit of a dork who doesn't really know what's going on.

Live-Action TV[]

  • In one episode of The IT Crowd, Moss climbs into a crane machine to get an iPhone that was dropped in but gets stuck. Jen manages to use the crane to get the iPhone, but Moss has to try and move to the side to let the iPhone slip through. When it finally gets out Moss exclaims "it's beautiful."
  • Friends rather justifiably does this with Joey's passing a kidney stone, and for extra laughs directly juxtaposes it with Phoebe's actual labour in the same hospital.
    • Truth in Television in this case. Many women who have given birth and also passed a kidney stone will tell you, the kidney stone is the more painful experience.
  • In True Blood, the scene where Jason has to get blood drained from his dangerously engorged penis is staged very much like a scene of a woman in a hospital giving birth.

Magazines[]

  • Either Cracked or MAD featured a two-panel comic: panel one was a man telling his panting wife "come on, push, you can do it...", and panel two revealed them trying to get their stalled car to move before the wife told her husband to just call for help already.

Western Animation[]

  • In the episode of Futurama when the Planet Express crew brew some beer inside of Bender, the whole thing is an extended pregnancy metaphor (right down to the fermentation process causing his belly to expand). So naturally, the scene where they bottle the beer is just like this.
Cquote1

 Bender: I think I'll call it Benderbrau if it's an ale, or Botweiser if it's a lager...

Cquote2
  • In the Pinky and The Brain episode "Brinky", The Brain attempts to clone himself, which almost works until Pinky's DNA (from a clipped toenail) accidentally gets combined with Brain's, thus essentially making them parents of the resulting clone (and Pinky calling himself the clone's "mommy"). Most of the dialogue during the cloning process is scripted like an actual birth: for example, when the door on the cloning machine won't close (which is the reason Pinky's DNA is even in there), the Brain tells Pinky to help him "push", complete with Pinky doing Lamaze breathing.
  • In Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, Ellie is giving birth while Diego fights off some raptors trying to kill her. At one point Diego is the one appearing to go through labor pains, and then the camera pulls back to show him pushing a raptor off a ledge.
  • The Cleveland Show episode in which Junior swallows his goldfish pet.
  • A second-searon episode of Ugly Americans presents Mark's oversized soul in this manner, complete with Randall acting like a Panicky Expectant Father.
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